Amen, Brother.

I watched this last week and I still think about. It really took all your assumptions about horror movies today and just stripped them away. You thought you knew what was going to happen and it just surprises you and goes to level you didn't know was there. And it was relentless, but not in a gory way, it was psychological. It's like you felt your own martyrization.

I honestly felt drained after this movie. Not since I saw Audition for the first time back in the 90's, before anyone really knew much about J-Horror did I feel so emotionally jarred, and that to me is great filmmaking. If I movie can invoke such a strong emotional response, then it has done it's job.

Movies like Martyrs change you, because it causes you to think deeper into what is going on and the message that film is telling you. It's not just entertainment, but a psychological and philosophical experience. This is a film, but you gain the knowledge and truth of the events without the consequences, which is truly remarkable.

OKayyyy I finally watched it.. annd I loved it. Everything about it. The first half was better for actual scares. Half way through the movie could have been the end of the movie and I would have been happy, but then it just kept getting better. I can describe what I liked about Martyrs for an hour, but I have no words for how I feel right now.

I cried (on camera) nearer to the end. It wasn't as intense as I thought it would be, but it was still really something, and I really wanted to stop watching 3 or 4 times, but I didn't. I thought getting up to get a much needed drink, or pausing to bawl my eyes out would ruin the huge buildup for the end and i am so glad I just stuck through it.

This movie was great i have watched it twice so far and it is goi9ng into my dvd collection for sure

I can easily see how people can express different opinions about Martyrs. The diference from one act to the next- it almost seemed like a colaboration between 2 directors. I really liked the begining and middle, but the ending felt long and dull. Not to say the ending was dull, just after answering and raising all the questions from the first half of the movie, any chance of maintaining an emotion impact had been spent (for me).

It was a really good movie, a strange, twisting and twisted tale that was also very fresh and original. If you have problems watching a woman get tortured, I would stay far away from this one.

I guess the main problem I have with the supposed "message" is this:

The secret society was trying to find out about the afterlife. They felt that at the final point of self-sacrifice, a martyr is able to see God, the afterlife, or whatever you want to call it. The problem is that the girls they torture and kill are not martyrs. They are purely victims. They are not dying for a cause that fills their heart, mind, and soul. They are dying because they has the unfortunate luck to be kidnapped by a cabal of lunatics.

Compare the monk who immolated himself to Anna being beaten repeatedly then having her skin peeled off. The monk died for a cause. Thích Quảng Đức was protesting the persecution of Buddhists by South Vietnam's Ngô Đình Diệm administration. He died with his heart and mind focused on bringing awareness to an injustice. What cause did Anna die for? What filled her heart leading up to her death? Terror, pain, and confusion. An utterly pointless death in all sense of the word.

Martyr's "message" would have made much more sense if the secret society members were the ones offering themselves up for the beating, torture, and ultimate death. But that wouldn't make as compelling of a movie now would it? Who would care about a bunch of pseudo-religious nutjobs torturing each other to death? There would be no reason to empathize with the victims because they wouldn't be victims. So the only route to go would be to kidnap innocents and torture/kill them so that the audience would actually care about their fate.

Martyrs was a valiant effort, but was weakened in my opinion by a hackjob of a plot device to explain and hour and a half of violence.

I wasn't impressed. It was smarter and better directed than, say, Hostel, but it still boiled down to "torture porn" in the end. It wasn't deep or smart enough to cause any great reflection or pose serious questions.

queued at Netflix

Loved it loved it loved it.:)

I have this one, but have yet to watch it. Maybe I will in the next couple of days, to see what all the fuss is about.

Whats 'torture porn'?

Movies such as Hostel/Saw, where the main focus of the film is around the torture of the on screen characters. It's a new name for the same old thing.

Started watching this earlier in the week but it was late and I was struggling to keep my eyes open.

:D

Exactly - just another media label to pigeon hole the horror genre - fucking retarded if you ask me..

No one ever called Ilsa 'torture porn' - it was good ol' Exploitation back then.

and everything old is new again

I thought it was really good , there were a couple of pretty extreme tone changes in it though

First half was good, second half was long and drawn out for no reason.

Review is in the "last seen movie" thread.

I actually prefer the second half.

I think the unrelenting and repedative abuse was to help show how she was withdrawing into herself and becoming numb to the pain and violence and how she had begun to accept death. The road to what they were calling her 'martyrdom'.

Glad I went into this one blind. I dug how the first half had an almost supernatural tone to it but it just decended into the Hostel kinda deal once again...

Still this and Frontier(s) kill the bubble gum bullshit coming out of the states.

There seems to be a lot of hate for Frontier(s) but i kinda liked it.

I enjoyed it more than Martyrs to be honest. The nazi characters were a hoot :D

But yeh it was Hostel buzz once again with some heavy handed left wing idealogy hammered in, that was a bit abvious and annoying.

There was another film it was similar too with a bunch of ravers ending up at a psycho family's farm... whatever the fuck it was called escapes me but Frontier(s) killed it anyways.

Finally brought myself to watch this film and Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

Can't say I "enjoyed" it, or even "liked" it... In fact, I found myself crying at the very end of it. The fact is, I just don't have the stomach for exploitative, violent, and torture movies, even if there is an "end" to the bloody means. It makes me feel sad, violated, helpless and hopeless.

But as the Madame says in the film, It's so easy to create a victim...

In that regard, the movie is successful. Hell, not just in that regard - It's successful in a myriad of ways:

Brilliant first half of the movie that keeps the tension high that you can barely pause to catch your breath - Fantastic suspense, tension, and emotion.

As MM says, the movie could have ended there for me too. In fact, there were quite a few places mid-film where I thought to myself, "Wow. The movie must be almost over. What a fantastic fucking film. I can't wait to go on Facebook and HDC and gush about this... But it's so short!! Oh, wait - It's not ending... Where can they possibly go from here??

So to its credit, it does answer the proverbial question, Where can they go from here? by completely defying expectations (I thought for the first 45 minutes that all the talk about "torture porn" - heh hehe Ferox - was going to turn out to be a bunch of malarky... BOY WAS I WRONG) and COMPLETELY catching me off-guard (despite this movie being out for quite some time!! I was STILL taken off-guard!! Just like... A VICTIM).

And the rest of the movie was executed with cruel, cold, calculating precision, absolutely horrifying and stabbing at me with every scene.

To say that it took me to a depth of misery that I have never experienced before with a film is an understatement. At the end, I wept at the blackness - At the hopelessness - At the fact that I had just exposed myself AND the boyfriend to a film that I KNEW would make us uncomfortable. But, oh, "uncomfortable" is a bit of an understatement...

But here's the thing about Martyrs: It's smart. Like, wicked smaht. It's not just abuse for the sake of depravity - It actually had a message driven into the sadism - And the "message," while some have said that it was preachy and over-the-top, I found really, really interesting. That made the movie a bit more palatable than your average exploitation flick.

But ultimately, I think that the movie's mission, in part, is to make victims of its viewers - To torture them as they do poor, beautiful Anna.

So.

Does Martyrs belong in TotalFilm's 25 Most Disturbing Films Ever? Yes.

Does Martyrs live up to the cult hype and praise? Absolutely.

Is it fair for someone to say Martyrs sucked? God, no.

Will I ever watch Martyrs again? Fuck no.



I'm going to go eat some chocolate, curl up with my Bear and hug myself until this feeling of unhappiness goes away...

Out of curiosity, just what did you think the "wicked smaht" message was in Martyrs? I ask because I found that the plotline felt weak and was basically a poorly thought out excuse for a quintessential torture porn flick and nothing more. For that reason I do say that Martyrs sucked. It had the potential to not suck. It could have been a supremely disturbing movie (that's not to say it's not disturbing of course), but the vehicle for the violence just does not work at all if you know what a martyr actually is. Maybe there's another way to look at this movie that I'm just not seeing.

+1

Different strokes and all, but it really didn't work for me.

The first half was fucking insane. The atmosphere and intensity had me at the edge of my seat, and scared to be there! If it ended there it wouldve been great. Instead it took an absolute dive bomb into dread and helplessness. A bit too much torture porn IMO. If they spent more time on WHY they were doing that and less time beating the shit out of the poor girl i think it might have been more widley accepted by audiences. That being said ive never felt more like a victim at the end of a movie so in that sense i really enjoyed it, but I still think the reasoning behind the torture couldve been more in depth.

Well questions for you: What is your definition of "martyr," how does it differ from that of the film, and why does it destroy the plotline for you?

...

I really liked (well I'm not sure if "liked" is the right word) the concept of creating Martyrs. I found it incredibly eerie and disturbing.

I think that the question you bring up is really Does the end justify the means? I'm honestly not sure, but mostly because I honestly detest torture flicks - Just can't watch 'em. But, regardless, I thought that the premise was interesting (I use the term "interesting" carefully here because I can't necessarily say, "WOW THE PLOT WAS AWESOME WHAT A REVEAL" - I just thought that it was a different way to show the horrors of the religious zealot). There's more going on here than just a torture movie - You have this concept of literally manufacturing martyrs - Something that we see today with suicide bombers and the like... And the ultimate message? There is no Redemption for those who create martyrdom.


That, to me, made the movie "smarter" (or smahter if you're from Boston) than the average torture flick.



Which "it" are you referring to? The plot (e.g. Creating Martyrs), the movie in general, or both?

It's interesting to see how people are responding to the "reveal" - I found it interesting, but it seems here that people are finding it contrived.

"Creating martyrs" would have worked, if the film had earned it. In my opinion, the premise and execution was flimsy. That's just my opinion; if it worked for others that's fine.

I can understand what you're saying... When we were introduced to the Madam who had her exposition-laden speech about 'Martyrs,' I honestly thought that that scene and the movie going forward were going to turn out to be some kind of hallucination constructed by Anna. I thought that it was really silly and unbelievable at first...

It's definitely the concept that did it for me (well, that "interested" me at least)... I looked beyond the execution because the torture aspect made me so damn uncomfortable (which is of course the point).

A martyr is someone who dies for a cause they believe in, typically a religious cause, but not necessarily so. Which is the same definition the movie uses in regards to the martyrs referenced throughout history, but has absolutely no bearing on the girls.

The girls in the movie were not martyrs. They were victims. They did not believe in what they were being killed for. They did not want to see the edge of other side to gain knowledge and insight beyond the normal human experience. They simply wanted to die. They wanted the incessant physical and mental torture to end. The only way the plotline would have actually worked would have been for the members of the secret society to be the ones undergoing the torture and subsequent death. But then who would care? Torture porn works only if the person being tortured is unwilling. They have to be a victim in order to increase the tension as well as give the viewer some reason to actually sympathize with what's going on, making the torture that much more disturbing and visceral.

To me, Martyrs is a very powerful, disturbing film that had so much potential, but ultimately fell flat due to a lack of forethought by the writers.